In fairness, mine seems to be defective. I'm posting because I noticed that there seems to be a flood of these on the market at very low prices lately, and I fear that Kyocera or some middle man has dumped a bunch of bad ones. It exhibits horrible horizontal bands across the image. It's like every tenth or twelfth row of pixels is dark brown.

Otherwise, the camera seems to be sturdy, and its controls react fairly quickly to input. It starts up quickly, and this was one reason I bought it. I was also impressed by the reviews stressing its lack of shutter lag. That's been a little disappointing. I also own a Sony DSC-V1, which seems every bit as fast in shooting, and which Sears is selling at killer prices all around the country right now. The V1 starts up slower, but fires as quickly, and lot more accurately. The S5R fires quickly when the focus is confirmed, but even then, it's out of focus much of the time (despite the supposed focus confirmation). The V1 on the other hand, focus quickly, shoots quickly, and is almost always dead-on accurate.

The pop-up flash is an annoying design feature. It's right where lots of people want to put a finger. But,the Sony has the same flaw. If you hold the camera correctly,with the left hand cradling it from the bottom, it's not an issue. Another real annoyance is the limited manual control. There are only two user-selectable f-stops in the manual mode. On the Sony, I get everything from 2.8 to 8 in third-stop increments.